Today’s Old Master Copy

When you’re busy raising hamsters, you’ve much less time for drawing fish.  Alas.  So, to while away the time not spent watching baby hamsters squirm, when I am not busy cooing  — and saying “oh, look!  how cute!”  — I do this.  Today’s copy after an old master is from Rubens’s famous painting of his second wife Helena.

Yep.  Left hand again.  If I keep this up, I’ll be afraid to draw with my right hand again!

My lament

I was telling a friend of mine last week, as we strolled through the National Gallery of Art, how much I missed my old friend Titian.   His painting Venus Blindfolding Cupid has been taken off regular view ever since somebody decided that it’s not a real Titian.  The theme is ironic.  Love, blind.  Well, I’d say that some of the Italian curators are have a little vision problem too.  It’s such an incredibly beautiful painting.  Interesting to compare with its counterpart in Italy.  (The image exists in a different version across the pond, probably one reason that the authenticity of the NGA picture is doubted.) 

Alas.  Well, thinking about it got me in motion.  I went digging around looking for a reproduction of the image so I could look at it.  And I made the quick drawing above.  Became quite captivated by the face — which is more ordered than the face of the Italian picture.  Quite possibly the NGA version might be painted by another artist — I’m not saying it’s not.  But it’s such a beautiful painting.  Can’t it be enjoyed simply for what it is?  For its own loveliness?

Loopy Lines

My kid wanted a drawing lesson today so I suggested she do what the old masters did when they were pups: copy.  Asked what she wanted to copy, she said she wanted to draw  ”an old renaissance picture with people in fancy clothes.”  So I gave her a catalog from the Met, and she ended up choosing Ingres’s fabulous portrait of the Princesse de Broglie. 

She had some questions afterwards about aspects of her drawing so to answer them I made a super-fast “copy” of my own, the above.   I’m glad I can teach my kid to draw because drawing becomes one more tool a person uses for thinking about things.  Whether one becomes an artist or not is irrelevant.  When you know how to draw, you see things in a new way.  Moreover, drawing is a useful skill.  You can design all manner of things once you know how to imitate the image you hold in your mind.

Only once did a teacher show me something in art by making a drawing of it herself.  That was my high school art teacher Karol Thompson.  In college and ever after, every question one asked was answered with talk. 

I have the utmost respect for anyone who will answer a question by picking up the pencil and “telling” in lines and shades.  My daughter’s question was very focused and my answer — my loopy answer — was equally quick and free.  And that’s the way I like it.

Having Fun

Regular readers of this blog know I like to make copies.  I also like to have fun.  A while back when I was drawing horses I made these two drawings which live on the same sheet thanks to the invention of construction tape (used to make a larger sheet by combining several sheets together).  I was copying horses from Japanese art.  Unfortunately I can’t remember who the artist is.  Hiroshige, Hokusai, someone else?  I dunno.  But here they are. 

My copies are definite interpretations.  Mine lack the rigor of the originals (boo woo) and also have a laisser-aller element that I attribute to the “fun” aspect.  If one were turning Japanese masterworks into kid cartoons, you might get a drawing somewhat a kin to these.

But, hey, sometimes an artist just wants to have fun.

Jan Lievens and Me in Color

I was browsing through the exhibition catalog of the National Gallery of Art’s Jan Lievens show today.  Made a quick drawing after the wonderful “tronie”  Man with a Beret.  I used colored pencils.  How I’ve changed.  I used to be such a snob.  I didn’t think that colored pencils were a “serious” medium.  Now I love them. 

I’ve grown.  Nowadays my attitude is, “if you can draw with it, how wonderful.”  I love drawing.  Whatever you can capture ideas with is a “serious” medium. 

Get your own copy of Lievens here.

When in Rome Do as the Romans Do

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  And copy all their statuary.  Alas, not having a ticket to Roma, I must content myself for now with Roman Portraits.  I’m still trying to figure out a way to draw these faces in something like the manner of Vincenzo Gemito.  (I’ll have to get back to you on that.)

Copying the Old Guys

This drawing is “after” Annibale Carracci (1560-1609).  Carracci, however, made his drawing in pen and ink.  Mine is conte crayon.  Sometimes it’s interesting to copy other artists — especially old dead masters who can’t come after you with accusations of copyright violation.  And sometimes it’s fun to really “copy,” trying to get every i dotted and t crossed as best one can manage.  I call that aspiring to Xerox machinedom.  Or you can alter the copy even as you copy by some method of deliberate interpretation.  So in this drawing I chose the conte as a meta-tool to imitate the ink wash drawings that Carracci also made in abundance. 

That’s a bit convoluted, so let me redo that:  I copied his pen and ink (line drawing) using a soft medium (conte crayon), but I used the conte in a manner to imitate (somewhat) Carracci’s ink and wash techniques (that he used in other drawings). 

That would make my copy officially a double whammy.  (Or a double header.  A double something ….)

My Diebenkorn, My “Berkeley”

Blogger June Malone posts a copy she made after an abstract Gerhard Richter watercolor, saying that she wasn’t sure she understood Richter’s abstraction, but that copying one taught her more about achieving depth and richness of color in the watercolor medium.

It inspired me to pull out my copy after Diebenkorn above.  The original, Berkeley #57, painted the year I was born,  lives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  There’s a great many differences between my copy and Diebenkorn’s original painting which I’m aware of even though I’ve never seen the actual painting.  I’ve seen enough Diebenkorns to know that his oil painting’s surface is very textural whereas I kept the acrylic paint I used to make my copy fairly thin.  The scale of the paintings is radically different.  Diebenkorn’s painting is 58 3/4 inches square and mine (not truly a square) measures 18 x 24 inches.

However, like June, I found the practice of copying an abstract painting very intriguing.  My approach to copying Diebenkorn, not withstanding the paint, is rather more like a drawing in feeling.  I drew his lines and shapes, felt my way through the image’s forms, and ignored (of necessity) the layerings that I know exist in the original.  Also, my copy has a lot of “me” in it. 

Copying his painting was somewhat like taking a short walk with him in a Berkeley of imagination (I’ve never even been to California).  And while we walked, suffice to say we had a brief and pleasant chat. 

Diebenkorn’s painting is abstract, having no identifiable subject matter.  But it contains many feelings about natural forms, some of them landscape .  Equally it has many touchstones to early European and Euro-american painting: indebtedness to de Kooning, for instance, and through de Kooning more remotely to Picasso.  The SFMOMA site has some videos of Diebenkorn being interviewed and working.

Fast Landscape

During the last several months my schedule has become one of almost constant interruption so I’ve been tinkering constantly with ways of trying to hold onto ideas.  Last paintings that I tried stalled because just as I get “fired up” I have to stop and turn my attention elsewhere.  For a time I was hardly painting, taking refuge in drawing (admittedly NOT a bad refuge) and other things (reading, study).

Well, I still have a large partly begun canvas on the easel — and I’m NOT giving up on it.  Far from it.  But I did sit myself down one day and gave myself a heart-to-heart talking to (I find that an integrated personality is highly over-rated).  I decided — or me, myself, and I decided — that any painting is better than none.

What’s more I have tons of materials left over from some old projects that I no longer need for their original intended use.  I decided that I was going to crank out something.  Whatever it was, some of it was going to be fast and free.

It’s better to be painting than not painting.  It is better to be making line and color decisions than no decisions at all.  I decided that I’d rifle through old photos — better working from photos than not working at all — and I was going to paint whatever I could — whatever I wanted to — I was throwing caution to the winds.

Needless to say, I’m beginning to really have fun.  And I’m getting more jealous of my painting time than formerly.  Sometimes I’ve got fifteen minutes.

By golly, I whip out the brushes.  Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes!

Look Into My Eyes

In the previous post, I displayed the whole drawing of which this is a detail.  I like to look closely into my own drawings.  I like seeing stuff enlarged.  All the small lines of thought fascinate me.  It’s a good way to think deeper into what your doing.  All the hatchings, all the little smudges … isn’t life like this?  All fuzzy with texture.

This isn’t a self-portrait.  It’s a detail of a drawing I made after a Raphael portrait.  However, I do pout like this sometimes when I don’t get my way.